OK, maybe not morning sex, but fossil fuels, yes, or so says a researcher at Stanford. Supposedly, the cost of fossil fuels or not fossil fuels have reached a point of parity when considering all factors. This would be using technology that is current art. I wonder if this research has been peer reviewed in the one year interim since this article was published?

A new study – co-authored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi – analyzing what is needed to convert the world's energy supplies to clean and sustainable sources says that it can be done with today's technology at costs roughly comparable to conventional energy. But converting will be a massive undertaking on the scale of the moon landings. What is needed most is the societal and political will to make it happen.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

"We have been doing research in tandem solar cells for a much shorter length of time than in the single-junction devices," said Gang Li, a member of the research faculty at UCLA Engineering and a co-author of the Nature Photonics paper. "For us to achieve such success in improving the efficiency in this short time period truly demonstrates the great potential of tandem solar cell technology."
"Everything is done by a very low-cost wet-coating process," Yang said. "As this process is compatible with current manufacturing, I anticipate this technology will become commercially viable in the near future."

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

Expensive, heavy, low energy density batteries are currently the chief impediment to Electric Vehicles. Here is a ten fold breakthrough. If this is for real, it's a game changer, from a physical science standpoint. The key issue will be cost. That's a Serious Battery

Quote:

Energy density is the amount of energy (watt-hours) per kilogram of battery weight. Typical lithium-ion batteries used in cars today have energy densities in the 150-250 watt-hours per kilogram range. The PolyPlus lithium-water battery has achieved the highest recorded energy density of 1,300 Watt-hours/kilogram, or an almost 10x improvement over current lithium-ion batteries.

To put this into perspective, the Nissan Leaf has a 24 kilowatt-hour battery pack for a nearly 100 mile range. It's battery pack will weigh in the neighborhood of 96-160 kilograms. Using the 1300 watt-hours/kg energy density PolyPlus reports, storing the same energy storage would weigh 19 kilograms, and a 96 kilogram battery pack would carry 125 kilowatt-hours of energy storage, for 5x the energy carried on todays Nissan Leaf, which should offer a nearly 500 mile range.

PolyPlus is currently testing samples of its lithium-water battery and expects the product to be commercially available in 2013.

- Torque News

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

Here is a good article that summarizes why the price of petro joules will remain high. The easy oil has been pumped. There is still a lot of oil left, more than we've already used, but it is mostly difficult and expensive to recover.

Those who claim that the world remains "awash" in oil are technically correct: the planet still harbors vast reserves of petroleum. But propagandists for the oil industry usually fail to emphasize that not all oil reservoirs are alike: some are located close to the surface or near to shore, and are contained in soft, porous rock; others are located deep underground, far offshore, or trapped in unyielding rock formations. The former sites are relatively easy to exploit and yield a liquid fuel that can readily be refined into usable liquids; the latter can only be exploited through costly, environmentally hazardous techniques, and often result in a product that must be heavily processed before refining can even begin.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

In 2011, the average selling price for crystalline silicon PV modules was cut in half — falling from $1.80 at the beginning of the year to $0.90 in December, according GTM Research.
With a glut of silicon now on the market, buyers are starting to renegotiate contracts downward. This could help drop the average price for crystalline silicon solar modules to as low as $0.70 a watt. Brett Prior, a senior analyst with GTM Research explains how a ramp-up in silicon production activity in 2011 will impact the market over the coming year:

In 2011, in the polysilicon industry — and the solar supply chain in general — manufacturing outpaced end-use. After a half-decade of silicon demand outstripping supply, the aggressive expansion plans finally overshot. This supply/demand imbalance will push producers to lower contract prices closer to the level of manufacturing costs at $20 per kilogram, and will force higher-cost manufacturers to exit the industry. While the solar market will continue to grow at a 10 percent to 20 percent pace in the coming years, reductions in the amount of silicon used in each module means that end demand for polysilicon will grow at a slower pace. The end result is that the current roster of over 170 polysilicon manufacturers and startups will likely be winnowed down to a dozen survivors by the end of decade.

I once did an april fools' joke based on the claim that CPUs and memory would increase in price due to a silicon shortage.

__________________Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it openSee me / and if my face becomes sincere / bewareHold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me togetherSave me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn

German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity – equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity – through the midday hours of Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank has said ... Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50% of the nation's midday electricity needs.

German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity – equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity – through the midday hours of Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank has said ... Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50% of the nation's midday electricity needs.

Meanwhile in Belgium electricity prices dropped to 1/5th of normal because of the overcapacity produced in that same weekend. Belgium had to export electricity to France to avoid problems caused by overcapacity, according to the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws: http://www.hln.be/hln/nl/957/Binnenl...rweekend.dhtml

Wait 'til I troll the toy airplane guys with this. Thanks Watser?, this is the most awesome thing evah. Good mokey. I think I'll LINK DIRECTLY TO YOUR POST! Here it is. Right at the top of a new page. I linked to us.

Here's the Reuters report on it, I just saw. Apparently they almost made that much electricity a few times before.

Quote:

"Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity," Allnoch told Reuters. "Germany came close to the 20 gigawatt (GW) mark a few times in recent weeks. But this was the first time we made it over."

The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world's leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed.

Government-mandated support for renewables has helped Germany became a world leader in renewable energy and the country gets about 20 percent of its overall annual electricity from those sources.

Germany has nearly as much installed solar power generation capacity as the rest of the world combined and gets about four percent of its overall annual electricity needs from the sun alone. It aims to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

That is interesting. Hopefully something can be worked out, along the lines of this quote from the same source -

Quote:

"Protecting sensitive environmental and cultural sites and developing solar energy power plants on public lands is not an either/or proposition," Gensler said. "It is important that these reviews take place in a timely manner so that the Southwest can use its vast solar resource while creating jobs, driving new investment and diversifying America's energy portfolio."

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

Renewable energy could fully power a large electric grid 99.9 percent of the time by 2030 at costs comparable to today's electricity expenses, according to new research by the University of Delaware and Delaware Technical Community College.

A well-designed combination of wind power, solar power and storage in batteries and fuel cells would nearly always exceed electricity demands while keeping costs low, the scientists found.
"These results break the conventional wisdom that renewable energy is too unreliable and expensive," said co-author Willett Kempton, professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy in UD's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. "The key is to get the right combination of electricity sources and storage -- which we did by an exhaustive search -- and to calculate costs correctly."

Here is another study that says We Can Do This! I really hope to see widespread use of clean energy before I reach my expiration date. That would be most satisfying.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

There are quite a few solar plants being built on the US/Mexico border in CA right now. The new CA carbon offset program has pushed generating costs up a lot. But solar and wind are still smaller and unpredictable percentages in the southern CA power market. Hydro is big up north and should be higher this year thanks to the higher rain and snowfalls.

Even our state has started tapping into it's wind potential (thanks for the all the fucking cold wind Canada). But mostly for the PR and to sell it to someone else as there are no requirements for renewable energy in the state. Two large wind farms are done and another one was announced this week. They'll proabably need to spend some serious money on a new transmission line to get the added power to the people. Especially if they keep adding more wind farms.

__________________
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.

What kind of breakthrough? Here's the cool part. Instead of relying on the velocity and mass of photons to knock electrons loose like billiard ball collisions from a (typically silicon) substrate to create current flow, this will use use tiny little copper antennas to pull light's EM energy directly from free space to metallic conductors, just the way radio antennas do (well, with an added little very cool twist). This could potentially mean capturing 70% of light's energy, rather than a mere 20% or so in the very best examples of previous technology. That is quite an increase! If it could be manufactured for a comparable cost to silicon based cells, it would absolutely put solar on a favorable cost basis to conventional power!

Here is a super duper cool application of nanotechnology. We haven't been able to do this before, because we simply couldn't make antennas small enough to work at the tiny little wavelengths of much of the sun's spectrum. The antennas can be spaced at a distance that will allow them to capture a continuous band from IR up through visible and UV! Wow! Current technology only captures a small part of that spectrum. Some cells have mixed two bands in the same substrate with some success, but this is way better than that!

Additionally, the antennas have built in little diodes printed in, which allows them to act like rectifiers at the same time they capture the energy! Very nice! I hope this proves practical at industrial scale!

There is still a lot of fiddle fucking around to do, but the guy says it's theoretically possible. Hope they can make it work.

Quote:

"We've already made a first version of the device," says Willis. "Now we're looking for ways to modify the rectenna so it tunes into frequencies better. I compare it to the days when televisions relied on rabbit ear antennas for reception. Everything was a static blur until you moved the antenna around and saw the ghost of an image. Then you kept moving it around until the image was clearer. That's what we're looking for, that ghost of an image. Once we have that, we can work on making it more robust and repeatable."
Willis says finding that magic point where a rectenna picks up maximum solar energy and rectifies it into electrical power will be the champagne-popping, "ah-ha" moment of the project.
"To capture the visible light frequencies, the rectenna have to get smaller than anything we've ever made before, so we're really pushing the limits of what we can do," says Willis. "And the tunnel junctions have to operate at the speed of visible light, so we're pushing down to these really high speeds to the point where the question becomes 'Can these devices really function at this level?' Theoretically we know it is possible, but we won't know for sure until we make and test this device."

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

Pretty cool, if you're into this sort of thing. Storing electricity from solar and wind is sort of a problem, batteries eventually wear out. Electrolysis would be great, splitting water into gases and then recombining them in a fuel cell, but it requires expensive catalysts. Here is a catalyst 1000 times cheaper than what we use now that works.

Electrolyzer devices use catalysts to drive a chemical reaction that converts electricity into chemical energy by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen fuels. These fuels can then be stored and re-converted to electricity for use whenever wanted.
The only byproduct from such a 'green' energy system is water, which can be recycled through the system. To store and provide renewable power to a typical house would require an electrolyzer about the size of a beer fridge, containing a few litres of water and converting hydrogen to electricity with virtually no emissions, the researchers say.
Key to their discovery is that they deviated from conventional thinking about catalysts, which typically are made from rare, expensive and toxic metals in a crystalline structure.
Instead, Berlinguette and Trudel turned to simpler production methods for catalysts. This involved using abundant metal compounds or oxides (including iron oxide or 'rust') to create mixed metal oxide catalysts having a disordered or amorphous, structure.
Laboratory tests -- reported in their Science paper -- show their new catalysts perform as well or better than expensive catalysts now on the market, yet theirs cost 1,000 times less.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant